Barbara Paech

As software engineering (SE) practitioners, we can help society by using our communities of experts to address a software need of a socially conscious organization. Doing so can benefit society in the locale of a SE conference and provide access to international experts for local organizations. Furthermore, established SE researchers as well as practitioners and students have the opportunity for a unique learning experience. While the SE community has already realized the importance of addressing human values and promoting social good objectives in software development, we are unaware of previous attempts to leverage SE conferences for this activity. Conferences present an opportunity to enjoy the assembly of SE practitioners, researchers, and students for the purpose of a philanthropic endeavor. Over the past four years of running a “Requirements Engineering for Social Good” event called RE Cares, co-located with the International Conference on Requirements Engineering, we worked with the stakeholders local to the conference venue. We selected stakeholders who would not necessarily have ready access to requirements engineering, software design, and development expertise otherwise, to build software targeting “good causes.” In the last two years, this event was altered to adapt to the constraints induced by COVID-19, moving to a hybrid mode and changing many of its practices accordingly. This paper summarizes and generalizes our experiences, discussing our lessons learned in the context of the pandemic and beyond and providing a framework for conducting similar social contribution in any SE conferences in general.

Trace links between requirements and code are beneficial for many software engineering tasks such as maintenance, program comprehension, and re-engineering. If trace links are created and used continuously during a project, they need to have high precision and recall to be useful. However, manual trace link creation is cumbersome and existing automatic trace link creation methods are typically only applied retrospectively and to structured requirements. Therefore, they focus on recall and accept manual effort to cope with low precision. Such manual effort is not acceptable continuously. Furthermore, the maintenance of existing links along with changing artefacts in a project is neglected in most automatic trace link creation approaches. Therefore, we developed and evaluated an interaction log-based trace link creation approachILto continuously provide correct trace links during a project.ILlinks unstructured requirements specified in an issue tracker and source code managed in a version control system. In the latest version,IL_Com, our approach uses the interactions of developers with files in an integrated development environment and issue identifiers provided in commit messages to create trace links continuously after each commit. In this paper, we presentIL_Com, its most recent evaluation study, and a systematic literature review (SLR) about trace link maintenance (TM). We also present a TM process forIL_Combased on two approaches from our SLR. In the evaluation study, we show that precision ofIL_Comcreated links is above 90% and recall almost at 80%. In the SLR, we discuss 16 approaches. Our approach is the first trace link creation approach with very good precision and recall and integrated trace maintenance.